That's great! I hope it gets picked up, I'm very interested in seeing his take. I'm also a Ken Branagh fan(I'm in the official fanclub), and his was amazing...but truer to the text/time than this will be. I can't wait! :D

Y'know, the Academy likes to reward big success (Titanic, Return of the King), but they'll never award a movie like The Avengers. However, they might reward Joss via Much Ado (assuming it's actually good!).

You know what I just realized though? There was huge backlash when The Dark Knight wasn't nominated for Best Picture. Also, Avatar is similar on my opinion, HUGE film that simply couldn't be ignored. What if this is the year a comic book super hero movie gets a little more respect? Especially the screenplay. I would love a nod for that.

But anyway, I'm a huge film geek/film festival snob that keeps track of Cannes every year so I would be thrilled if Much Ado played at Cannes :D

Sadly, that Deadline article lists every movie in English available at the Cannes Film Festival.

@Mitholas: i'm worried because i feel like it was just a little funny side project that people will judge harshly because of Joss Whedon's new fame. I don't want this movie to be labelled as the first post-Avengers movie from Joss Whedon.

True -- there is not a terribly good track record of third films in series being great. Even the third Lord of the Ring movie was the weakest of the bunch.

It would be crazy if Much Ado played at Cannes, but if I'm reading it right, it's just one of the films floating around the festival, looking to be picked up for distribution, right? And I admit to looking forward to the movie but not with crazy fervency; anything Joss directed but did not write (even Shakespeare, whom I generally prefer on the page rather than acted out) is not something that I am dying to see.

It would be great if it would be selected for Cannes.
I suggested "Much Ado" to the Mannheim-Heidelberg-Filmfestival, Germany last year (this festival can be compared with the Sundance Festival.)
If it doesn't make it to Cannes, it may be picked there for the competition.

Could there be a market screening for Much Ado at Cannes? I know there was one last year for Cabin & I'm here now, so I'd like to know, even if I can't go... Also, I loved the Branagh version as a kid and obviously a lot of the actors (especially Amy Acker, Fran Kranz, Nathan Fillion!), so I'm quite excited for this one.
Although I have to say, after watching two big Whedon movies lately, I really can wait. Hm... that Ken Loach film looks nice.

Some of the posters here really surprise me saying that they are not too excited for Much Ado. After The Avengers with Joss working with all those superstars i could not be more excited to see him back working with all my favourites from the verse'. I understand it's not the same as original Whedon but hopefully he will put his own spin on it and make it memorable. I for one am looking forward to this very much and the brief scenes shown on that CBS feature on Joss actually looked rather beautiful i thought, as i'd feared it would have looked ulta-cheap.

I am insanely excited about 'Much Ado About Nothing' and at the moment I'm just happy it will be shown at Cannes (they don't show everything that is submitted). I do hope it finds a distributor who can get it into theaters in the USA.

I am not at all worried that it wouldn't be good, I think that Joss is an excellent judge of what 'works' and he believes he made something worthy of the big screen (he knows already that he could make his money back by just putting it out on DVD).

I'm not surprised (or bothered) that Nathan Fillion and Clark Gregg were listed as the actors. But hopefully, in the aftermath of Cabin, Avengers, and Much Ado, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof will start getting more well-deserved recognition and work. I'm surprised how many of the movies on those list had huge Hollywood A-List casts!

Also when there was the backlash from The Dark Knight not being nominated... wasn't it the year after that that they bumped it to having 10 pictures nominated?(followed by changing it to 'up to 10') Almost like 'well we would have nominated it if we could nominate more films, so now we'll make it so we can nominate more films'. I still thought it was weird that people were considering it though (much like now with this... though it would be so awesome if it was...)

Return of the King might not have been *as* good, but it was the only one that won best picture (which means it was the year I started having less interest in the awards... I still watch them but... it was very much a 'well they have to win since this is the last of the series' kind of thing)... so, it might not matter it TDKR is good hah!

@DreamRose311 It was a huge hit but no more deserving of a nomination than Batman Begins. But with movies like these, if there's going to be a nomination, they save it until the final installment. Return of The King won Best Picture, but it was really the entire LOTR trilogy that was being recognized with that win.

Wow. Personally, I found Return of the King to be the best of the three movies. I still get choked up when Aragorn says "My friends, you bow to no one." It was the FIRST fantasy film to win major awards, and it swept the awards - every single one it was nominated for it won. (By "major" I mean Film, Director, Actor/Actress, not smaller awards like "Costume Design" or "Makeup.")

I have no interest in DKR. The only one of that trilogy I liked was TDK, and that mostly for Heath Ledger's performance. There was too much...I can't even describe what I didn't like. It felt too...fast-forward. Everything was fast - the dialogue, the plot, the camera work. I have the original four movies, even though they got progressively cornier with each one, but don't really care about the franchise.

I'm not a huge fan of Shakespeare, but I think I'd enjoy Much Ado because of the twist Joss put on it, filming it "modern" as opposed to "period." If the actors can deliver their lines without sounding like they've "memorized a bunch of Shakespeare" and are just "spouting off," it'll be a lot more enjoyable for me. Anyone can memorize the Gettysburg Address, but saying it like you mean it is a lot more difficult.

Count me as someone who is actually more excited about Much Ado than I was about the Avengers (which I loved--and have seen twice--but which I think is very much Joss-playing-in-someone-else's-verse). Shakespeare is everybody's verse--hell, he created most of the verse we all play in. Everybody makes a new Shakespeare every time they stage one of his plays, so I fully expect this to be quintessentially Joss-y (Joss-ish? Joss-oid? Oh, d'uh!--Jossesque!). From the first time I heard about Joss's Shakespeare readings during the Buffy days I've ardently wished I could have been a fly on the wall for one of those and this film is like that but even better. And really, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisov as B&B? Two of the greatest actors in the Jossverse who have been criminally underemployed since Angel ended? I'm positively aquiver with anticipation.

Oh, and I, too, love the Branagh version (Emma Thompson--swoon!), but there is no such thing as too many versions of any of Shakespeare's plays. No two versions are ever in competition with each other.

At the start of the year, Much Ado was the Joss movie I was most interested in. Having now seen both Cabin and Avengers, and having been blown away by how much better they were than my expectations, I am even more excited about this one. I just wish I knew when I'll get the chance to actually see it.

As for Oscars and film festivals, that whole side of the business confuses me. It would be great if Joss won something - we all know he deserves it - but I'm not holding my breath.

I think there's a (slim) chance that Joss could get a nomination for the screenplay for Avengers (the nomination for Toy Story, for example, was hardly less surprising)--I think there is roughly 0% possibility that he'd get a win, however. I think a nomination for Best Picture is not impossible, but highly improbable and a nomination for Best Director is pretty unlikely, too. I think it will get a bunch of nominations in technical categories (best sound editing etc.) and we'll have a chance of having the pleasure of seeing Joss get interviewed on the red carpet.

I, too, hope Much Ado will come to TIFF! It never occurred to me that it could. I'm still used to thinking of it as this tiny little thing that'll never see the light of day - I don't even know why, but it's really hard for me to remember that it's an actual feature-length film that will actually be released in actual festivals. I keep expecting it to just pop up on YouTube or something. Probably because it was so sudden and so low-budget. Anyone else get that?

In my experience the only time an audience cannot follow the action in a Shakespeare play is when the actors don't understand what they are saying. When you have really good actors, who know how to convey meaning, they will bring the audience with them. In fact I always found it difficult to study Shakespeare on the page, so I would borrow recordings from the public library (really excellent recordings of great actors) so that they would help me understand what I was reading.

I have no fear that Joss' troupe of fantastic friends (kind of like our own Super heroes of acting AKA BDHs) will make 'Much Ado About Nothing' come alive as a very funny and relevantly meaningful film.

If Lucas, or any of the Big Genre Directors had attempted this, my cringe muscles would be ... cringing ... in sympathy. But if any BGD had the quality directing chops and a slew of good actors with acting chops ready and able to do it, Joss can.